I still can't believe she's mine, after everything. After the wolf, her dad, the restaurant, the music, L.A., Baby, everything. Me.
Isabel, I love you.
I don't have to leave voicemails anymore. My toxicity is hers, hers, all hers.
Isabel.
She drums her fingers on my stomach, eyes closed, one earbud in. Through the other that's dangling down, I can vaguely hear tinny sounds, crashing drums, and my voice begging her to stay. I know she knows I wrote that one for her. I know she knows all of my songs are infused with her. I can't help it.
Isabel, I came here for you and I am staying for you and never letting you go.
Whenever I touch her, at the grocery store, the hospital, the studio, the tiny restaurants she brings us to, I always feel the same thrill that never gets old. She's electricity in icy eyes and killer lipstick. I am alive, alive, alive when I look at her.
Isabel.
She's all biting words and frozen stares, but we're different now. Ever since she opened her arms first, kissed me in my studio in front of everyone, whispered that she loved me, I understand the double meaning in her words. She can let her guard down now and we are fixing each other.
Isabel, neither of us are the sappy type but you've made me different you're different you're incredible.
We were on the beach with sandwiches Sofia had made us when I first asked her to move in with me. She had her papers from this clinic case and they slipped from her fingers and into the breeze. She thought about it for two months and I sent her too many text messages but she agreed. Her being there didn't change a thing for me. I never get tired of it, if anything, she isn't there enough. I can't get enough of her.
Isabel.
I love her shoulders. My fingers memorize the slopes, trying to learn how they made her her, with her posture and cutting confidence. They soften when she sleeps, unnaturally curling around me as her arms encircle my waist. Even if I was the doctor, I don't think I could ever understand the anatomy of her beauty.
Isabel, I want to be with you for the rest of my life.
I leave waxy chocolate doughnuts on her car dash, the grease leaving smears. I trace the marks as I sit in the passenger seat and watch the way her profile becomes an elegant silhouette against the setting sun.
Isabel.
She doesn't like pictures, how they twist a story, taking out a single moment. But it doesn't matter to me because her everything is permanently branded in my brain. Dancing at two in the morning almost tangled in the wires of the studio, the way she looks in white jeans, twirling her hair around my finger two-and-a-half times.
Isabel, I don't care if you don't want the ring or a white dress as long as you feel what I feel about this it doesn't need to be traditional.
I like making her coffee. The corner of her mouth lifting when I make it right, hands touching as I pass her the mug, trailing my fingers across her lips as I brush off a drop on her mouth.
Isabel.
She always catches me off-guard those few times she tells me she loves me. When she's tired of an argument, as I trace each bone on her body and she tells me their names, when I got rid of my shots of adrenaline. And most of the time when she doesn't say it, she never needs to. I can feel it in her fingers and see it in her eyes and hear it in her breath and that's all that really matters.
Isabel, I love you.
We write the song of our life side by side because we both know we write it better together.
